Friday, April 22, 2016

THE ORWELL PRIZE ANNOUNCES 2016 SHORTLISTS


The shortlist for the Orwell Prize for Books 2016 was announced today, Thursday 21st April 2016.
  • Three of the shortlisted books focus on the Middle East: Wendell Steavenson’s Circling the Square, Emma Sky’s The Unravelling and Jason Burke’s The New Threat from Islamic Militancy.
  • Two books from independent publishers Atlantic Books make the shortlist
  • Almost all of the shortlisted books are concerned with ‘chaos’ - from the immersion in it to the attempt to make sense of it.
The Orwell Prize for Books Shortlist 2016 is: 
  • The New Threat from Islamic Militancy, by Jason Burke (Bodley Head)
  • Other People’s Money, by John Kay (Profile Books)
  • The Tears of the Rajas, by Ferdinand Mount (Simon and Schuster)
  • The Invention of Russia, by Arkady Ostrovsky (Atlantic Books)
  • The Unravelling, by Emma Sky (Atlantic Books)
  • Circling the Square, by Wendell Steavenson (Granta Books)
The Orwell Prize is Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing. It is awarded each year to the book which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’.

The judges for the Orwell Prize for Books 2016 are Lord William Waldegrave, Professor Andrew Gamble, David Goodhart and Fiammetta Rocco. Lord Waldegrave joined the judges at the shortlisting stage.

The shortlists for the Orwell Prize for Journalism and the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils were also announced today. You can read all the shortlists here.

The winner of each £3000 prize will be announced at a ceremony on Thursday 26th May 2016. For press tickets please contact stephanie.lelievre@theorwellprize.co.uk.

1 comment:

Mark Hubbard said...

When I was blogging I should have won an Orwell prize. But, alas, Graham, obscurity.

Such is life. Bought my first dead tree book in years yesterday, trying to figure out how to read it in bed with the light out. Old tech is hard.